Earlier this year, we shared the story of how a classic NES Tetris player hit the game's "kill screen" for the first time, activating a crash after an incredible 40-minute, 1,511-line performance. Now, some players are using that kill screen--and some complicated memory manipulation it enables--to code new behaviors into versions of Tetris running on unmodified hardware and cartridges. We've covered similar "arbitrary code execution" glitches in games like Super Mario World, Paper Mario, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in the past. And the basic method for introducing outside code into NES Tetris has been publicly theorized since at least 2021 when players were investigating the game's decompiled code. But a recent video from Displaced Gamers takes the idea from private theory to public execution, going into painstaking detail on how to get NES Tetris to start reading the game's high-score tables as machine code instructions.

The blocks keep coming and the game itself gets reinterpreted, twisted and remade for new generations. Now, a 13-year-old boy has become the first person to'beat' the NES version of Tetris, 34 years after it was first released. Yes, 'beat' goes in quotes because there's no way to complete the game. Instead, he played such a flawless game that he forced a kill screen, from an overflow error. While he's the first person to do this, but not the first time it's been achieved: An AI program called StackRabbit forced a kill screen with the NES Tetris back in 2021.